Alibaba Buys Itself Back from Yahoo

It seems that Facebook
doesn’t get all of this week's press when it comes to major tech companies and deals
that go for billion-dollar figures. At least not as long as Yahoo and Alibaba have something to say about it.

Yahoo is
tying up some loose ends with Alibaba, in which the company has owned a 40-percent
stake for some time.

Alibaba will be buying back half of Yahoo’s stake in
the company, and it’s going to cost them $7.1 billion. Yahoo is going
to receive $6.3 billion in cash and as much as $800 million in preferred stock. The company initially bought the 40-percent stake for $1 billion in 2005.

This deal values Alibaba somewhere between $30 and $35
billion, meaning an IPO could also be somewhere in the not-too-distant future
for the Chinese e-commerce company.